SunExpress

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SunExpress (Gunes Ekspres Havacilik AS) is an airline based in Antalya, Turkey. It operates scheduled and charter flights serving the tourist market from Turkey to destinations in Europe. Its main base is Antalya International Airport (AYT).

Contents

1 Code Data
2 History
3 Services
4 Fleet
5 External links

Code Data

IATA Code: XQ
ICAO Code: SXS
Callsign: SunExpress

History

The airline was established in October 1989 and started operations in April 1990 with a charter service between Antalya and Frankfurt. It was founded as a joint venture between Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa. In 1995 Lufthansa transferred its SunExpress shares to Condor_Airlines (now Thomas Cook Airlines) to group all tourist flights under a single unit. The airline is now owned by Thomas Cook (50%) and Turkish Airlines (50%). It carried just over 1.35 million passengers in 2004. SunExpress is the only airline in Turkey that is ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS certified.

SunExpress Boeing 737-800 lands at Bristol International Airport, Bristol, England

Services

SunExpress operates the following services to international scheduled destinations from the hub Antalya (AYT) (at August 2005): Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Zürich and many others.

SunExpress also started to operate following new scheduled destinations from the second hub Izmir (ADB) 2006: Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Berlin (Berlin-Schönefeld International Airport), Munich, Hannover, London (London Stansted Airport), Vienna, Zürich, Athens, Antalya, Adana, Trabzon, Diyarbakir, Van, Konya, Erzurum, Kayseri.

Fleet

The SunExpress fleet consists of the following aircraft (at July 2006):

9 Boeing 737-800
3 Boeing 757-200

SunExpress average fleet age is 6.4 years (July 2006).

The Boeing 757-200 in operation was leased from International Lease Finance Corporation to provide additional capacity during the summer months (ref: Airliner World, September 2005). SunExpress plans to make the total fleet with 20 aircraft (5 Boeing 757-200 and 15 Boeing 737-800) in the year 2010 after the next deliveries.

Has leased a used Boeing 757-200 from ILFC, from June 2006, for 5 years.

External links

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